Page:Oregon Literature by Horner.djvu/30

20 perused its pages. In England, John Bunyan read the Bible until his language grew to be the language of the Bible, as may be seen in the "Pilgrim's Progress," an allegory in which human thought arose on angelic wings and took on the robes of Holy Writ. In Oregon a large majority of the people have been Bible-readers; and the ratio has been steadily increasing; hence the Bible element or Saxon element bids fair to grow in prominence in the language of our people. Furthermore, the experience and the culture of our people tend to mellow the feelings and warm the hearts of the masses and bring about a constantly growing demand for the language of the heart, the language of sentiment and sense, the language of those who use the best vehicle of expression in talking direct from the heart to a point.

It is an indisputable fact that climate has always exerted an influence upon a truly great literature, and there are those who believe they have already noticed marked indications of climatic influence upon what has been written in our state; and they pretend to believe that this influence will continue in its development so that it will be more noticeable and more influential as the years go by.

It is known that in an extreme temperature the best intellectual results are seldom attained. Human energies are exhausted in the effort to sus-